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About AbRASiON

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Sorry for the late reply, this site stopped emailing on replies it seems.
DD seems no good under linux, it's going to take FOREVER as it is for only 12gb of data, let alone 3000gb
I've actually tried in a completely diff PC, although I will be trying a short SATA lead to be certain.
What's Testdisk? Any good?
Oh and she is marking bad sectors as expected after all :/ damn

Anyone got real good experience recovering data? I know about a few tricks over the years, I've dealt with a few dying drives, some unrecoverable some not. Anyhow, thing is this drive is a weird one. No reported bad sectors. Spindle motor is totally fine, not ceased (so freezer trick is meaningless) Drive isn't better when cold or hot. The problem is the drive is reading at /literally/ 1kb/s in most sectors of the disk. It also unfortunately will have copy / "I/O ERROR" in Ztree when copying some files. Others files it copies without issue, slowly but perfectly good files. There's a 12GB directory I'd particularly like, I've managed to get about 9gb of it. Is there a tool to endlessly retry? or somehow copy and ignore errors? I dunno. I already know about DDRescue or whatever it is, but that's a full disk image dump, considering the drive speeds, not an option really. Similar with spinrite, I believe it's going to basically spend forever across the whole surface, when all I care about is one 12gb section. I'm unsure if the disk is doing some kind of sector remapping or what - chckdsk simply isn't an option. Takes long enough on a 3TB disk that's running 100MB/s - current speeds it simply times out (chkdsk) Any ideas? The data isn't SUPER SUPER important but I'm happy to leave it in a caddy running for weeks on end if some kind of tool can coax the data off, it's worth a shot at least before I give up on it. Also - anyone seen this before? SUPER slow disk? What could it be?

I was reminiscing about the WD Expert 18gb review I read here in 1999 and I can't find it, also the google cache isn't finding it properly either.
Are these still around? That's from an era when I would read this site daily and read every review religiously.
Anyone?

The WD's are still in service with no bad sectors - the transfer speeds are occassionally a bit bunk but overall quiet and reliable :/ Vastly superior to the Seagate filth I picked up in early 2009, lesson learnt (yes, I made sure they had the good firmware)
I'll pick up some 4TB disks and a raid cage of some sort in about 18 months I guess.

Don't bother getting one until they come down 50% in price and increase 200% in speed (so 12 months)
Seriously, I have 2 in RAID0 and the difference is negligable if you know how to configure a machine to be speedy and have good specs.
Maybe on a slow, crap laptop with 1gb ram, no worries but a 6gb desktop with 4 cores and Windows 7 with readyboost the difference was very very small.

I have no doubt people will be giving you a lot of stick in this thread for this post.
I would however like to confirm your thoughts on this.
I recently added 2 of the 120GB OCZ agility disks to my PC, I can read over 400mb/s write over 220mb/s and random is over 20mb/s write.
That being said, in 'real world' usage, as someone who has a pretty powerful PC and knows how to optomise it the performance difference really isn't that great.
(I can load Crysis now in 24 instead of 34 seconds and a few other things, sure)
The thing is it's not half as pronounced as I expected, and while I would no longer EVER recommend a ''performance' platter drive like the raptor I wouldn't say I could recommend an SSD yet.
It IS faster but at the current prices and with the articles out the last 4 weeks and rumours, they are working hard on many many new controllers for the things (ONFI 2.0, SATA 6GBS) I have a strange feeling about June 2010 SSD's will be substantially cheaper and substantially faster.
I realise that's obvious, but as a brand new tech it's evolving much faster than other technologies
I would NOT buy an SSD now, I would buy a decent 7200rpm WD drive, learn how to optomise /temp/ /pagefile/ and use a decent defrag tool - patience is a virtue and 2010 is the year of the SSD, not 2009.
EDIT: Also consider a readyboost disk, I'm surprised to admit it works fairly well.

The disks would go from 100mb a second to 50mb a second, back to 100mb a second, it's almost as if they write to platter 1, then platter 2, then platter 3, then platter 4 basically.
Whilst on platter 2 or 3 I guess, there was a rough spot and 2 disks slowed the heck down.

For what it's worth the WD's tested completely fine with 0 bad sectors - the format was a format within a CMD prompt within Windows 7.
As we discussed the other month, the Win 7 and Vista formats do actually do a 0 fill on the disk if you specify the /P: command (possibly even without?)
Now I recall one of your big write ups you had exactly the same problem with a disk towards the end of it and somehow you basically 'cured' the dead spot by writing 0's or doing something? (actually 2 of my disks are doing this, one much worse than the other, must be near 100gb of the surface of it!)
I can live with it, if the drive won't die, it's only to hold movies and so on but if I can cure it I'd be happy to try something.
The new WD Greens are incredible, it's hard to tell it's on when it's on the desk and you're touching it! that quiet, that little vibration - the hard disks are quieter than the fans in my already quiet case, it's amazing.

Here is another shot, it's on a 2 pass format using Windows 7 and it's around the 50% mark.
2 disks have it, one less than the other, can this be fixed?! I was under the impression the Windows 7 and Vista format actually writes 0's to the disk.